PODS Tutorials
Balder ten Cate
University of Amsterdam
Bio: Balder ten Cate is an associate professor at the University of Amsterdam, where he leads the Theoretical Computer Science research unit of the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC). Previously, he was a computer scientist at LogicBlox, a staff software engineer at Google, and an adjunct associate professor at UC Santa Cruz, and held visiting professor positions at Stanford and INRIA. His research spans applications of logic in computer science and AI, with a particular focus on data management and machine learning. His work has received best/distinguished paper awards at ICDT 2012, PODS 2023, and IJCAI 2023, as well as 10-year test-of-time awards at PODS 2023 and ICDT 2026, and his research has also been featured in the Research Highlights sections of Communications of the ACM and SIGMOD Record. He served as PC chair of ICDT 2026 and is a member of the ICDT Council.
Martín Farach-Colton
New York University
Bio: Martín Farach-Colton is the Leonard J. Shustek Professor of Computer Science and Chair of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at NYU, where he works on pure and applied algorithms in I/O-efficient storage systems and has worked in streaming algorithms and string matching. He was Founder and CTO at Tokutek, Inc, an enterprise database company, which was acquired by Percona in 2015. He has been a Member of Technical Staff at Bell Labs (1997-98) and was an early employee of Google, Inc. (2000-2002). Farach-Colton received his M.D. from Johns Hopkins and his Ph.D. from the University of Maryland. He is a Fellow of the AAAS, ACM, IEEE, and SIAM, and a Member of the Argentine National Academy of Sciences.
